Untold Issues of Gender and Creativity get an Outing

'Less lip service and more lipstick' was the call from Deana McDonagh, industrial design lecturer at Loughborough University in an evening addressing the gender imbalance within the design world and possible reasons for it, organised by Untold in the shape of Jane Austin of Recollective, at the ICA in London.

McDonagh has explored gender and the perception and use of products – particularly the different relationships of the sexes to shared products – and identified three major trends:
* the appearance of a user-centred design paradigm in industrial design,
* needs and wants being expressed much more by users,
* the female and the feminine being recognised and acknowledged as valuable.

She declared herself optimistic that these trends would benefit both women and design. 'I tell students that we come in knowing nothing and need to expand our horizons,' she said. 'There is no substitute for getting closer to the user: and so closer to the female voice, the introvert's voice, the welder's voice, and so on.' She looked briefly at the process of individuation and the potential for mass customisation as well as the way that products too are seen to have unique and complex personalities.

She was joined in leading the evening's discussion by two designers: Fred Flade of de-construct and Laura Jordan of Lateral and the University of Westminster. Both gave an account of their creative processes and in both cases raised gender as an issue that had come up in their work. Flade's design for Panasonic's Formula One website aimed itself at the predominately male F1 audience and he had worked to capture their interest by presenting a competition and access to backstage worlds. Jordan was brought in by client XBox, specifically to challenge its appeal only to young males. She introduced to the website the chance to play with words and sounds, using literature and general entertainment rather than just gaming to extend its appeal. Both revealed an individualistic way of working that referred back extensively to both target users and client, though only Jordan talked specifically about usability.

The final speaker was Sean Nixon of the University of Essex, who presented findings on a study of the gender imbalance in advertising creative departments, asking whether the dimensions he had isolated as relevant were pertinent in digital design studios as well. Female 'creatives' account for 18% of staff in creative advertising jobs, whereas other roles such as account handling and media buying break down as about 50:50. He gave two suggestions for why this might be the case:
* The creative role is still associated with the Romantic hero of great Art, who has genius and an egotistic, passionate and self-destructive nature. This role has never been associated with women, who, it was tradtionally allowed, might have the craft skills of the decorative arts, but were generally too civilised, domestic and interested in order to be genuinely creative.
* The management of creative spaces favours male culture: beer, pizza and table football for the moments between projects and fierce competition between teams, late night working and motivation based on 'cruelty' for the rest of the time.

In combining these dimensions, he referred to the 'whim of iron' necessary to succeed in the British advertising industry as a creative, linking the childlike, irreverent, open mind of the 'lad' that produces the design with the confident, assertive will that can force through a design against all comers.

Comments to the panel revealed that many in the audience recognised the 'deep-rooted cultural assumptions' he was describing from their own experience. Interestingly, many of the female designers in the audience were clearly born elsewhere. Symptomatic of the invisibility of British female designers or, perhaps, of the more active interest that other nations take in the issue? Jordan, herself an Australian, raised the problem of the 'Good Girl syndrome' which holds women back from asserting themselves. She suggested that women are sometimes considered 'aggressive' and 'bitchy' when they push their work forward, in a way that would be unlikely to happen to an assertive man.

Nixon concluded by pointing out that male creatives had been quick to exploit the potential of 'new laddism' - identifying with it and fuelling it, and wondered what the benefit might be to society if more designers were female.

Associated Link: The Untold site

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